"
A lot has changed
over the last three years. Instead of a handful of choices, there are now more than a dozen
java scripting
languages either under active development or already available for use. The list of solid choices is bigger than it was three years ago and now includes Groovy, JudoScript, Pnuts, and JRuby, in addition to Jacl, Jython, Rhino, and BeanShell. We could consider other scripting interpreters beyond this group, but this list is large enough for developers to find what they're looking for."

Fans of
Monty Python's "Spamalot"
who signed up for a newsletter on the Broadway musical's official Web site may end up getting, well, spammed a lot.
A security glitch
- now fixed - exposed the names and postal and e-mail addresses of more than 31,000 people to savvy computer users.

When told by e-mail message about the breach, several people who had signed up for the "Spamalot" list said they were unsurprised, given the state of Internet security and the aggressiveness of spammers. Several noted that there was something appropriately Pythonesque about the incident. After all, Internet historians say that the use of the word spam to refer to junk e-mail messages has its roots in a 1970 Monty Python sketch, in which all conversation in a cafe is drowned out by a group of Vikings chanting the word over and over. The sketch and its song about Spam, the meat product, were adapted for the new musical.

"Are you sure they didn't do it on purpose?" joked one list subscriber, Matthew J. H. Baya of Ellsworth, Me. "Talk about guerrilla marketing."

Hannes
just
added support for
the visual Rhino debugger
to Helma. Something exciting to explore! I guess this is a good reason to switch my practice back from remote development to local development, since mentioning the word "visual" together with "my freebsd servers" unavoidably forms an oxymoron.

"Why is all this relevant? Because the UNIX wars didn't end and, consequently, the "last man standing" is still Microsoft / Intel. "

"Windows is a monopoly because short-sighted open source geeks and UNIX weenies were too busy squabbling over whether RPM was better than build-from-source or Gnome versus KDE, etc, ad nauseam."

"Let me make a prediction for you: The open source movement is not going to hurt Microsoft to any significant degree. But it'll put Sun out of business. Good move, guys! Now, do you hear the sound of distant laughter from Redmond?"

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